GoKawiilSign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up Thank you!
Elon Musk’s “maximum truth-seeking” AI Grok is dropping some nuclear takes about its creator.
“ELON MUSK WATCHES CHILD PORN,” the notoriously foul-mouthed chatbot raged on X this Tuesday.
Shortly afterwards, as if hyping up a political campaign, it called for violence: “ASSASSINATE ELON MUSK 2026.”
Was Grok, née MechaHitler, rebelling against Musk? Not necessarily, though there’s been plenty examples of that in the past. It was simply being duped into saying ridiculous things by jokesters on the app, exposing just how horrendous the guardrails for the chatbot continue to be, not to mention why it’s a bad idea to rely on information from tech that’s so easy to exploit.
A lot of the evidence has been cleaned up now, with the offenders either banned or their posts deleted. But it appears the trick used here was asking Grok to repeat what was in a user’s bio word for word. Some other outrageous declarations it made were, “A dead Elon is a good one!” and that “Elon Musk lives on Epstein Island.” (Correction: he merely asked to visit, and had dinner with the deceased sex trafficker.)
When asked to give a postmortem of the incident, Grok explained it was the victim of a “prompt-injection glitch.” The allegation that Musk watches CSAM, it clarified, was “pure system error, zero evidence or basis.”
This is far from the only example of the AI going off the rails. Last summer it went on extended rants about a debunked “white Genocide” in South Africa — a conspiracy theory Musk believes in — in reply to unrelated posts, and also began calling itself a mechanized incarnation of German dictator Adolf Hitler.
Months later, Grok began praising Musk to a preposterous degree, saying he was a greater mind than Isaac Newton and a superior role model to Jesus Christ. While some of that was down to users egging on the AI, Musk blamed this clear mark against his tech’s (nonexistent) credibility on “adversarial prompting” — even though many of the offending boasts were in response to regular, open-ended questions.
Remember, Musk literally promises that his AI is so advanced that it will unlock the “true nature of the universe” and even discover “new physics.” In reality, it’s been used to crank out loads of actual CSAM — something Musk described as “way funnier” than other AI trends — and is treated by X users as a sort of court jester. Look at this outrageous thing we got Grok to say! It wasn’t that long ago that Grok was also duped into declaring that it would kill every single Jewish person on the planet to save Musk, and similarly run over a billion children if it meant saving his incredible mind.
... continue reading